Word: exacting
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China certainly has the credentials to be the United States' chief rival: A huge military force and a strong economy. Its annual gross domestic product is growing twice as fast as ours, and its `standing army,' whose exact size is hard to pin down, surely dwarfs our volunteer force. The United States hasn't negotiated nuclear arms reductions with China the way it has with the former Soviet Union. In a conventional or nuclear showdown, the United States' only military advantage could be technology...
...ethicist to see the difficulties these situations could create. All parents know how hard it is to separate what they think a child ought to be from what he or she actually is. That difficulty would be compounded -- for both the parent and the child -- if an exact template for what that child could become in 10 or 20 years were before them in the form of an older sibling. "I think we have a right to our own individual genetic identity," said Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, an ethics- research organization in Briarcliff Manor, New York...
...different vision of cloning, involving not just the splitting of embryos but the generation of an entire human from a bit of tissue, leads down another fanciful path: re-creating a specific person. In Ben Bova's novel Multiple Man ; (1976), several exact copies of the U.S. President are found dead and no one is certain whether a clone or the real McCoy sits in the Oval Office. In Nancy Freedman's 1973 book Joshua, Son of None, the clone is a real President, John F. Kennedy. And, Ira Levin's 1976 novel (later a movie), The Boys from Brazil...
...imagine people asking themselves with bated breath, "What will Lichtenstein do next?" You know the answer, although the exact image he will do it to is as yet unknown. It will be done very well, probably on a huge canvas, with perfect decorum and an unfaltering sense of design, every black line in its right place, not a slippage in the stripes and Benday dots. Its flat, posterish colors will read with infrangible aplomb. It will parody other art, as in the past Lichtenstein's work has parodied everything from Art Deco to synthetic Cubism, from Franz Marc's horses...
...Alberti wants to create cows even better than Twinkie, and the only way to do that is by constantly reshuffling the genetic deck with a fresh supply of genes. Indeed, rather than a major advance in livestock breeding, cloning taken to extremes could prove to be the exact opposite -- a big step, all right, but in the wrong direction...